Communicate Openly:managing project development with available and open-source tools

Marliese Thomas * Auburn University LibrariesEmailPROS- Good for small groups of people- Great for internal communications, like meeting agendas- Everyone has email

CONS- Can quickly fill your email inbox- Difficult for collaboratively working on documents

Listserv (vufind@auburn.edu) keeps everyone in the loop easily

Blogs, Wikis, & Google Docs

PROS- Great for document editing by multiple people

- Relatively easy to set up and manage - no special expertise (unless it’s on the Intranet)

- Creates a historical record of the project- It’s free! (usually)

CONS- Must create an account to create these things

- Can be limiting in your choice of format, document types

Redmine: an open-source tracking system

PROS- One location for receiving technical bugs, enhancement requests

- Tickets can be assigned to multiple people

- Documents related to the project can be uploaded and saved in one place

- Reporting a problem is as easy as sending an email

- Updating a ticket is as easy as replying to the email report

- Users can be assigned different administrative levels

* Allowed us to seamlessly transfer project administration as we went from development to maintenance mode.

CONS- It’s open-source, so some technical expertise and hardware is required

- We haven’t figured out a way to keep spam from generating a ticket

Original image by knezeves: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8729549@N08/528199341/